<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <docID>330340</docID> <postdate>2024-10-06 07:55:53</postdate> <headline>Sharks are the great survivors, but the Meg is toast</headline> <body><p><img class="size-full wp-image-330341" src="https://citynews.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20120627000507175305-original-resized.jpg" alt="" width="900" height="600" /></p> <caption>Sharks have been a mainstay of the earth's marine population for half a billion years. (Tracey Nearmy/AAP PHOTOS)</caption> <p><span class="kicker-line">By <strong>Katelyn Catanzariti</strong></span></p> <p><strong>Sharks adapted their skeletons, teeth and size to become the ultimate fighters of the sea world, surviving all five global mass extinction events over 500 million years.</strong></p> <p>But that doesn't mean there really is a megalodon lurking in the depths of the ocean, says John Long, a leading Australian palaeontologist and the author of a new book on sharks.</p> <p>"That's bollocks," he tells AAP, laughing.</p> <p>"I've seen The Meg. It's absolute fun, but it's bollocks."</p> <p>In the 2018 action movie, The Meg, a 23-metre-long prehistoric megalodon shark thought to be extinct, reappears and attacks deep-sea explorers on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.</p> <p>"We haven't found a single tooth younger than about three million years anywhere on the planet," says Professor Long, who has been fascinated by the prehistoric sharks ever since he found a fossilised tooth on a beach at the age of eight.</p> <p>"The other thing is, Meg is like other top apex predators - they mostly feed in the top surface where the whales and other prey are.</p> <p>"And when they die, guess what? They float. They get washed up on beaches.</p> <p>"If there was a single population of Megs out there, we would have seen them by now.</p> <p>"We don't need to worry about the Meg. The Meg's not coming back."</p> <p>Despite a well-earned reputation as one of the top predators in the ocean, humans don't even have to worry to much about the sharks alive today.</p> <p>"More people are killed by deer or by donkeys or horses," says Prof Long, who has written a book called The Secret History of Sharks: The Rise of the Ocean's Most Fearsome Predators.</p> <h3><span style="color: #800000;"><strong>Australians surf in areas that are well known for sharks</strong></span></h3> <p>Official shark attack records kept by Florida's Museum of Natural History show about 10 people are killed by a shark a year.</p> <p>"Admittedly, half of them are from Australia," Prof Long said.</p> <p>"But people in Australia like to go surfing in areas that are well known for sharks - they take that risk willingly."</p> <p>Prof Long argues everything is a risk.</p> <p>"I love riding motorbikes. If someone says, 'oh, you're crazy, they're dangerous', I say no they're not, they're fun. That's the risk you take, you know? You could choke on a chicken sandwich."</p> <p>Prof Long has spent decades studying prehistoric fishes, with a particular interest in the sharks that have been a mainstay of the earth's marine population for half a billion years.</p> <p>"From a scientific point of view, why they're really interesting is because of all the jawed animals on the planet today - which include all the fishes, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, etc - they're the only group that have survived all five of Earth's major mass extinction events," he notes.</p> <p>"And they have reshaped them into successful survivors."</p> <p>One of the ways in which sharks have adapted for success is by divesting the bony skeleton they started with and developing more lightweight, flexible cartilage.</p> <p>It was Prof Long who first discovered the ancient remains that demonstrated this evolutionary step, in the Kimberley region Gogo Formation fossil field in WA.</p> <p>"We discovered this ancient shark had cartilage with remnant bone cells in it," he said.</p> <p>"So it was like a smoking gun showing early sharks had more bone... then they were losing it as they developed these highly advanced kinds of cartilage.</p> <h3><strong><span style="color: #800000;">Sharks have honed a series of superpowers</span></strong></h3> <p>"It was a great scientific discovery at the time... you just want to sing for joy.</p> <p>"You hit a rock and it splits and you see, not just an amazing fossil, but you see a life of something that once lived - the only evidence of its living presence on the earth ... a precious relic."</p> <p>Sharks have honed a series of superpowers to survive over the ages, including a fine tuned sensory system - giving them electroreception, an acute sense of smell and incredible hearing - and an unparalleled suite of Swiss Army knife-like teeth, totalling up to 30,000 over a lifetime.</p> <p>Sharks have also learned to use celestial objects to guide the angle of their attacks and have similar psychological processes to serial killers, according to recent studies.</p> <p>But it wasn't always easy, Prof Long says.</p> <p>Their recovery from The Great Dying extinction event that happened 250 million years ago took a long time.</p> <p>"They were small for about a hundred million years afterwards - no bigger than about a metre," he says.</p> <p>"And it took about another 140 million years after that event before they started getting really big again and becoming top dogs in a sea that was full of gigantic reptiles and other fearsome predators."</p> <p>These days, it's not predators putting sharks at risk. It's humans.</p> <p>"(We are) decimating them like faster than you could imagine," Prof Long says.</p> <h3><span style="color: #800000;">Millions killed for their fins for the soup industry</span></h3> <p>Between 70 million and 100 million sharks are killed each year for their fins for the soup industry – a practice that is increasingly being banned.</p> <p>Many more are killed as "bycatch", after being caught in the nets of deep sea fishing trawlers.</p> <p>Then there's the sharks killed out of fear.</p> <p>"Films like Jaws, from the mid 70s on, caused a huge decimation of white shark populations off the North Atlantic," Prof Long says.</p> <p>"People were ruthlessly killing them, high on a cocktail of fear and just wanting to get revenge, get them out of the water.</p> <p>"About 79 per cent of the populations were decimated in the North Atlantic."</p> <p>Shark tourism is one way to try to redress the bad wrap the fish get because people will travel far and wide to get up close to a shark, either by scuba diving along smaller varietals or cage diving to see the larger predators.</p> <p>Prof Long was invited on one of these trips to give a talk on prehistoric sharks and took the opportunity to do his own cage dive.</p> <p>Over four days he spent up to nine hours in the cage on his own, taking in the "beautiful and magnificent" creatures.</p> <p>It was nothing like a scene from a movie.</p> <p>"They're just  powerful, sentient creatures that are swimming around," he says.</p> <p>"They're more interested in the fish and the baits in the water.</p> <p>"They're not interested so much in the humans in the cage."</p> <p><em>The Secret History of Sharks: The Rise of the Ocean's Most Fearsome Predators, by John Long, is out now.</em></p> </body>